108 - Finding A Wider Perspective

 If we look at Notre Dame in Paris from only one angle, we haven't seen Notre Dame. Likewise, if we look at a problem from our personal vantagepoint-what we think we are-then we can't have a real sense of what the problem is. Just to say, "It is not what I think it is" is a negative statement. The positive way to do it is to start looking at the problem from alternative points of view to our own point of view. What I suggest is to think of a problem, but as seen from the point of view of another person who's involved with us in that problem. That doesn't mean that another person's point of view is more valid than our own, but at least we now see the situation from two angles instead of one.

Generally we think of another person as the object of our awareness, but in meditating, we discover we are literally able to transpose our consciousness into that of another person. That person's way of looking at things may be as limited as ours, or may be better than ours, or more limited, but it does alter our perspective. For example, if that person were attuned to a very high state, then what we grasp of that person is going to be different from the way that person would be if s/he were dealing with the nitty-gritty of human problems. We can imagine how we appear to that person, and we realize the image that person has of us is not what we think we are and neither necessarily better nor worse, but then, I am not saying this is the real thing. No, I'm saying that we then the ability to see something about ourselves that maybe we didn't see when we were in our personal perspective. Our eyes can't see themselves.

The next step is to expand our consciousness to more people-three people, four people, and many more people-and eventually, we can just feel the joy of our consciousness expanding. It's like, for example, we have been sitting in the office or in the house the whole day, and then we have the opportunity to make a trip to the mountains and sit on the mountaintop and watch a fantastic dawn. What a joy to be out of that prison! Marcel Marceau does a famous mime routine. He's walled in, and he keeps on pushing the walls and they get further and further away, and the further away they go, the better he is able to dance, and eventually he dances the dance of freedom. Now that is essential to our work, pushing out our limitations.

There is another way of doing it. We imagine the starry sky, clusters of galaxies, and realize that the very fabric of our body is the fabric of those galaxies. The fabric of our body originated in the Big Bang as a pure outbreak of light, of pure radiance, and this light crystallized itself into what we call matter-although for a physicist, light is also matter-imagine light that has gelled into a crystal. Our bodies are much more elaborate than crystals. They are not frozen as a crystal, so from the moment we reach out in our thoughts to the vastness of space, and we realize that we ourselves, our body itself, is part of this starry universe-they can't be separated-that has a dramatic effect on our way of thinking of ourselves. We no longer see ourselves as a discrete entity with a boundary, the skin. We are not just expanding our consciousness; we are altering our sense of identity, or rather gleaning awareness of the vastness of our identity.

It is true that as we extend our consciousness, we lose the sense of our individuality, so it's good to balance that with the opposite. When we exhale, we experience this wonderful expansion of our consciousness reaching out further and further, losing the sense of our individual center. We then do the opposite as we inhale; we see how the totality of the universe converges as us. It converges just like a three-dimensional panorama converging into a two-dimensional photograph. The consciousness of the cosmos has become focalized, like light is focalized through a lens. We are focalized as our consciousness. Our consciousness is not different, not other. It is the consciousness of the totality.

We have the ability to toggle between an all-encompassing setting of consciousness and a personal one. For example, when we read the pages of a book, our eyesight is highly focalized, but when we look at a panorama, our eyesight is all-encompassing. We could toggle between the two. We could read a book while sitting in beautiful mountain scenery, and then look at the panorama, and look at the book again, toggling between the two. We can do the same thing with our consciousness.   When our consciousness is expanded, we can see our problems in context. That means we can see the implications of our problems instead of just seeing them from our limited, personal bias. Then we realize that what we thought was our problem, is simply our participation in the drama of the universe.

That is a way of liberating ourselves from the constraint of our commonplace assessment of situations, and our self-image that we carry in our psyche throughout our lives. We are carrying in our psyche a false assessment of our situations, of ourselves, of our relationship with the universe, convinced that that's the way it is. We suffer because of it. We are confused because of it. The expanding of our consciousness does have an effect upon our identity. We can expand our consciousness like our eyesight. We then have a wider sense of our identity. It doesn't seem logical to think that we are a fraction of the totality. We think, "How can you say that? I am a totality." Some mystics say that, but we wonder if they're crazy. We can't understand how they could say anything like that. It's something we have to gradually train ourselves to in meditation.

We would never, for example, be able to make sense of radio waves. The radio processes those waves by impoverishing them, so we can make sense of them-by limiting them. The same thing is true of our lives. We have difficulty in extrapolating between different situations. Remember Cinerama, where there were three screens in the cinema, and idea was to grasp this wide panorama, and we found that in fact we were scanning anyway. We didn't have the faculty of being able to encompass all this richness, If we trained ourselves, we would be able to extrapolate between those different images and make sense of the whole. That's what we do with our eyes. The vision of each eye is different, but we are able to extrapolate between those two visions. This is what we are learning to do in mediation, to be able to make sense of our lives in the context of the whole humanity, instead of being caught in our personal trip. That makes for maturity. We become a mature being. We become more and more cosmic, and less personal. That's the reason we use the word Tatagatha for Buddha instead of Siddartha or Gautama, because Tatagatha means "Thus." We become Thus. Impersonal.

What we are doing now is to try and reach beyond our narrow self-image, which not only distorts our understanding of our lives, but also affects our self-esteem. Our self-esteem is important, helping us to to find fulfillment in our lives. We are proceeding in a counterproductive manner in our lives by standing in the way of the fulfillment of our lives-by limiting ourselves to our self-image. We need to notice that we are always relating our self-image to the totality, and totality to the self. We are always connecting the two. That is why the Sufis speak about the Divine Consciousness. It seems at first, in our minds, (because we think in categories) that the Divine Consciousness is out there somewhere, and this is my consciousness. In our meditation, we start working with expanding our consciousness over a period of time. It might take months and months, even years. We might reach that point which St. Francis talked about when he said, "I thought I was looking at the universe, but the universe is looking at me." That's a breakthrough in meditation. The Sufis would say, "I thought I wanted to know God, but it is God who is discovering Him/Herself through me." Or "I can only know myself by trying to have a sense of the knowledge that God has by discovering Him/Herself as me." That's Sufism.

Maybe it's difficult. In theory, in poetry, it sounds beautiful, wonderful, and paradoxical. We have the faculty of transporting our consciousness into that of another person, then the capacity of transporting it in the consciousness of more and more people, then in infinite regress, we are able to transport our consciousness into the consciousness of the universe. In order to do that, we have to downplay our personal consciousness, or the purpose of our personal consciousness, and highlight the consciousness of the universe. That's what happens in a very advanced state of meditation.

There is a difference between the cosmos and the universe. The cosmos is the body of the universe. Think of the universe as a being, composed of lots of cells-just like the cells of our body-which are endowed with a certain amount of consciousness, and will, and awareness. Our consciousness is the focalization of this total consciousness, this global consciousness. That means it is part of that global consciousness. That means our knowledge of the cosmos makes a contribution to the knowledge the cosmos has of itself. When we are looking at the stars, the stars are discovering themselves through our glance. Now perhaps we can better understand the words of Ibn 'Arabi, who says "God discovers Him/Herself as you", meaning the way the totality is actuated in a unique way in each fragment of itself. It's not God static, it's God dynamic.

Discovering God awakening by becoming existential-that is activating Him/Herself as us-is a very different way of thinking. We no longer think of God up there and us down here as miserable worms. It's a completely different way of looking at it. This way of thinking is going to open the door to having a sense of the sacred, because we respect each being as an expression of the Divine Being. This is what is called God-consciousness. "Is it possible that the being of God, whom I imagined to be up there somewhere remote, is present within my own being?" We realize it is only our concept of ourselves-self-image we call it, our refusal to accept the Divine gift of our being-that stands in the way of our ecstasy, that makes us low key. The breakthrough of ecstasy-realizing that the totality of Being at all levels, not just the physical world, but all levels, that is coming through us, or is us, or is being aroused as us-is an incredible thought.

Imagine Einstein pushing a pram in streets of New York. A lot of people pushed prams in the streets of New York, but while he was doing it, he was thinking of space and time and galaxies. Most people think that they're pushing their pram, right there in the streets of New York. They cannot see that that is only a very small piece of the totality. It is so easy to be caught in a perspective.

The first American astronaut who landed on the moon gave a seminar at the Zenith Institute. He said, "You can't imagine the thrill of hurtling back home through space at tremendous speed and thinking, 'my family down there, right down there on that planet, over there it is very far away,' and thinking, 'well, yes, I am looking forward to meeting my wife and children and all the circumstances, but I just hope that I won't lose that sense that I have gained of the vastness of reality.' " In fact, he never lost it.

We don't have to take a space ship to gain a sense of the vastness of reality. This is what we are doing in meditation now. It's a matter of our realization. That is the way out of the prison, and it makes for the maturation of our being. We can't come back from the door through which we came to this state. We can only come back through another door.
